Computing devices may be configured with a wide and ever-growing variety of hardware and/or connected to a plethora of peripherals. These hardware devices and peripherals are typically managed by scripts known as device drivers and may not be usable without the correct driver. Each piece of hardware or peripheral may have its own driver, which may be customized or tailored for each operating system the hardware may be connected to. Even virtual devices may use drivers to interact with operating systems.
Early systems for installing drivers often required users to have access to physical media, such as a compact disk, that came with the hardware. More modern systems may automatically inject drivers into the operating system during device installation. However, drivers may be lost during computing system crashes or may not be available from their original sources if a computing environment is restored onto different hardware than the computing environment was originally generated on.
Traditional systems for restoring system volumes typically involve injecting drivers into an offline version of a volume after the volume has been restored. However, these systems often use specific code that is tailored to the hardware configuration and/or operating system of the device in question, increasing the difficulty and complexity of maintaining proper driver configurations. Vendors of an operating system also often change which registry keys are updated upon driver injection, requiring the applications that inject these drivers to be rewritten each time.
In some traditional systems, Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM) applications may be used to inject drivers before the volume is deployed to a target device. However, anticipating the future hardware configurations of computing systems that have not yet been deployed may be very difficult, making it unlikely that the correct combination of drivers may be installed in advance. Accordingly, the instant disclosure identifies and addresses a need for additional and improved systems and methods for injecting drivers into to-be-restored volumes.